Research

Fit-for-purpose, affordable body-powered prostheses is designing upper limb prostheses that are both low cost and fit for their purpose and circumstance. The project is funded through the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Global Challenges Research Fund.

As part of the AT2030 programme, the GDI Hub will support Motivation in testing their new wheelchair provision system in Kenya to evaluate the quality of the new designs and understand how distributed manufacturing through 3D printing could augment current wheelchair service provision models.

The GDI Hub, as a part of the AT2030 Spark Innovation Sub Programme, has partnered with Amparo to support them in carrying out a clinical trial to evaluate how the Amparo Confidence Socket could help the provision of lower limb prosthetic in Kenya.

For demand-based innovation to thrive we require a range of activities which can both adapt to good ideas coming from disabled people as well as working more closely with the market-shaping project to iterate business plans and create routes to market that were otherwise not available.

Researchers from theDevelopment Planning Unit at UCL, along with Leonard Cheshire, are working with the GDI Hub to undertake an exciting programme working with communities living in conditions of informality (often referred to as slums) in Freetown, Sierra Leone and Banjarmasin, Indonesia.